"Ever since the publication of The Harmony
of the World in 1984, Charles Baxter has slowly gained a reputation as one of America’s
finest short-story writers. Each subsequent collection—Through the Safety Net,
A Relative Stranger, and Believers—was further confirmation of his mastery: his
gift for capturing the immediate moment, for revealing the unexpected in the
ordinary, for showing how the smallest shock can pierce the heart of an
intimacy. Gryphon brings together the best of Baxter’s previous collections
with seven new stories, giving us the most complete portrait of his
achievement. Baxter once described himself as “a Midwestern writer in a
postmodern age”: at home in a terrain best known for its blandness, one that
does not give up its secrets easily, whose residents don’t always talk about
what’s on their mind, and where something out of the quotidian—some stress, the
appearance of a stranger, or a knock on the window—may be all that’s needed to
force what lies underneath to the surface and to disclose a surprising impulse,
frustration, or desire. Whether friends or strangers, the characters in
Baxter’s stories share a desire—sometimes muted and sometimes fierce—to break
through the fragile glass of convention. In the title story, a substitute
teacher walks into a new classroom, draws an outsized tree on the blackboard on
a whim, and rewards her students by reading their fortunes using a Tarot deck.
In each of the stories we see the delicate tension between what we want to
believe and what we need to believe.”
